'End' game silliness.

I'm not really understanding this point. Other games also offer grouping opportunities in instanced content and grouped quests.

As for the "real RPG experience", part of the appeal of an MMO, of paying $15, is getting a continuous stream of content. Personally, when I play MMOs, it saves me money, because I pay $15 a month vs 60-120 for whatever new consoles games hit. I tend to tune the rest of gaming out, for better or worse.

If there is no "post-cap content" (let's not call it "endgame", since some people miss the point), then people don't have a reason to keep their fifteen a month going.

I don't care if it's raids, PvP, new planets, gear to grind for (even cosmetically), new titles...you need a system to keep people hooked, because even if ToR isn't "designed" for the WoW/EQ type of MMOer, they surely want a reason to keep people pumping money into it, no?

I find the people asking about Life at 50 entirely reasonable. They aren't demanding a new raid, right now. They want to know what the plan is.

With so many other MMOs before it's time, it's reasonable to expect ToR to have some sort of plan. Right now Bioware has stressed the Legacy unlocks, new planets, and a "whole team dedicated to PvP", so people want more details.

It's natural.

The blind drones who slam against these people are the offenders, not the level cap inquiries.

if there is an end to leveling there has to be an end game.

Your point makes no sense. Stop making excuses for BW.

That's the biggest problem. People think SWTOR is suppose to be WOW, Rift, or whatever and be a gear grind running the same dungeons/flashpoints to death earning stupid raid currency.

The meat of this game is in the middle- not at the end... The hardcore raider and PVPer will be shocked but I am overjoyed. A game actually focusing on what I care about- it's hard to sink in. Unfortunately the tears of the cryers are always saltier and Bioware will probably change just to shut them up.

MMOs should be games that aspire to do it all, such as character creation, story immersion, competitive PVP, masochistic grind, platform action, perplexing puzzles, mini-games, etc. The issue is how much and what types of things do you require of your customers and/or give priority to in the design process.

I agree with the OP that MMOs shouldn’t be just endgame grind, but those types of activities shouldn’t be excluded completely. For instance, I detest paying to grind with no real story reason and get tired fast of repeating the same missions for a few percent better stats, but I may want to run it a few times and then let the true raid grinders have their fun while I run off to PVP or play an alt. However, players like me would/will quickly quit if the story just stops and we were expected to just PVP/raid/remake alts. The RPG in MMORPG is just as important as the MMO.

Yes it definitely blew my mind, but not in a good way. What you said makes no logical scene.

The game starts when i hit the play button on the game launcher.

You could have said levels 1-85 is a boring time sink and the fun starts at 85. That might have been given a wow factor, but would not have blown my mind. I would have just said, why cant 1-85 be fun, or why cant the entire game be fun?

Lets forget some discriminating concepts like hardcore and casual, and look at gamers in general. People that play video games all want to have fun. This includes all types of people that play games.

If the content is fun people will want to play that content at least once. To get someone to play content over and over it has to be more than just fun it needs to be extremely fun.

Lets use a bouncy ball as an example. If i could only bounce it up and down it would loos its appeal fairly quickly. Now lest add that i can bounce it off the walls and it gets more fun. Add in the ceiling and we have even more fun, but the base line consept is sill bouncing a ball and thats all we are really doing, the same thing over and over just in slightly different ways to get slightly different outcomes.

By adding in variation and making something more fun over all everyone has a greater experience. We cannot exclude anyone from anything. If we start doing that we start limiting what can be done. By limiting what can be done we limit the amount of fun we can have with any given game.

Good point....

With your analogy there should be no problem with pvp/raiding being the only part of the game as long as you can "shake it up" once in a while, like WoW's hardmodes where bosses are almost completely different.

I agree. Orson Scott Card gets way too much hype for a book I didn't even like.

Please sir, we beg you. Stop posting.

For regular games, sure, endgame might seem a bit silly. I like it, when games go on and on, in a sort of sandbox mode, rather than abruptly ending, but I can understand that not everyone is going to feel the same way.


MMOs are different, though. They're not just games, to be played and discarded. They're extremely social, and players like to feel part of the larger community and all that - something that just fizzles, if it's just a linear revolving door sort of game, that doesn't allow for much of a community to ever form.


This is where endgame comes in. It gives players much longer-term goals, to pursue with the characters they've developed, to be part of the gameworld, instead of just passing through it.


It can also give a greater sense of purpose to the leveling process - that feeling of working towards something, rather than just leveling up for no reason. I've been through too many MMOs to care about leveling up, just for the sake of leveling up, anymore. I like have something like RvR to give the whole thing some meaning.


Then there's just the matter of retention. For an MMO to ever grow, it needs to give players reasons to stick around. The longer they do, the more the subs will accumulate, and the more money they can rake in, to keep developing the game, instead of leaving it to languish, while the devs move on to other projects.